The Pew Research Center today released the 2013 State of Journalism in America. The popularity of the printed press and the radio is in decline, while online media, on the other hand, is experiencing fast growth.

39% of respondents said that they saw their news yesterday from a mobile device, versus 34% in 2010. When one takes into account all digital devices, the figure is 50%, second only to watching the news on television. Traditional media are in decline for those who say that their source of information is the radio (just 33%) or the newspaper (29%). There is a growing online audience reporting that they get their news from social networks (19%), 16% by email and 8% from podcast.

The rapid growth of online information is impressive, according to the study, mainly due to access to mobile devices (31% of adults have a tablet, and 45% own a smartphone, ten points more than a year ago). More than 60% of the mobile device owners, (whether a tablet or smartphone) watch the news on these devices at least once a week, and 36% even watch the news on a daily basis.

The most popular sites to see the news is Yahoo News, in part because of its agreement with ABCNews, followed by The Huffington Post, which has risen from fourth to second place. The New York Times lost three places in the ranking.

The HuffPo is clearly the world’s first content aggregator (reproduced stories in September: 2531), and the web site is benefiting from its interactions with Facebook and Twitter. It is followed by Dailymail.co.uk (1715), Yahoo.com (1668) and bbc.co.uk (1621).

Digital advertising revenues

In 2011, digital advertising revenues (23% of all advertising sector in the United States, up 3 points from 2011) were exceeding advertising revenues from newspapers. In 2016, Digital Advertising could reach 29% of the total. Although mobile advertising revenues grew by 80% compared to 2011, it only accounts for 7% of the total. According to eMarketer, in three years, it should account for 21% of total advertising revenues.

One of the problems of digital advertising media is that 64% of total revenues are concentrated in only five companies: Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and AOL.

Video advertising grew by a huge 47% in 2012. 38% of those surveyed by Pew Research said they used their tablets to watch video once a week, 12% watch: daily. Video is already the second type of advertising, but it will compete more effectively with the banner in the coming years.

Advertising revenues of the press fell last year to $22.5 billion, with $3.3 billion consisting of online advertising (15% of total). However, for every 15 dollars lost in press advertising, online only earned one dollar.

Moderate optimism

For the first time since the crisis of 2007, the newspaper industry appears to have stabilized. Of the 1,380 daily newspapers, 450 plan to adopt paid content plans, which together with rising paper prices and increased subscriptions, have helped stabilize the situation caused by the declining advertising. Newspapers are cutting the number of days of publication per week, while reducing paper newsrooms, for online expansion.

comScore just published a new report on 2013 Canada Digital Future in Focus. The highlights are:

Canada continues to be a leader in engagement, with users spending more than 41 hours per month online on their desktop computers, representing the 2nd highest engagement across the globe. Canada ranks 1st in terms of monthly pages and visits per visitor.

Online video is of growing importance to the digital ecosystem as long-form viewing and premium programming migrates online. Canadians rank 2nd worldwide in terms of monthly hours of video viewing (25) and number of videos per viewer (291). The Entertainment category saw the largest growth in number of videos viewed versus a year ago.

The digital ad market is healthy and growing in Canada, with 724 billion display ad impressions in 2012, up 17 percent year-over-year. Social Media, Entertainment and Portal sites continue to account for the highest share of impressions.

The rapid adoption of internet-enabled devices is contributing to a more fragmented digital media landscape. Smartphone subscribers grew by 17 percent in 2012, with Google Android now accounting for 40 percent of the market. Subscribers watching video on their mobile phones has increased 21 points in the last year, while search is the fastest-growing mobile content category.

Social Media players are increasing their visitor base and engagement, while Facebook maintains its strong lead in the category. There are several rising stars to watch in 2013 – Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pinterest and Instagram are all seeing strong visitor growth rates.

Major industry verticals are experiencing growth in digital channels. Retail e-commerce reached $22.3 billion dollars in Canada in 2012, up 10 percent versus a year ago. Banking and Automotive content consumption and digital advertising are also experiencing gains across both desktop and mobile channels.

A report from InMobi found that approximately 6 in 10 consumers are now as “comfortable” with mobile advertising as they are with advertising in other mediums. Moreover, mobile ads have influenced 46% of survey respondents to actually purchase something on their mobile devices.

“Mobile devices now permeate every aspect of modern life,” suggests Naveen Tewari, CEO of InMobi. “The study reveals that mobile users are always-on, whether surfing the mobile web while spending time with family (48 percent), at a social event (45 percent), commuting (60 percent) and shopping (43 percent). This creates a huge opportunity for brands and marketers to engage with consumers throughout the day unlike traditional advertising like print and TV.”

InMobi reports that the average mobile web user consumes 7.0 hours of media daily. Mobile devices represent 26% of this time and it is quickly growing. The following infographic (by InMobi) explains the evolution of media consumption.

According to RBC, the Information Technology stocks are often very cyclical. The companies depend on capital spending and business or consumer demand, which can be quite finicky. The stocks may also have long-term growth potential as new technologies are developed. Technology stocks are usually popular during early to mid stages of an economic expansion.

We are at the end of a recession in the USA and Canada is in an early stage of a moderate economic expansion. Mobile and social networks are driving the Internet economy.

I believe Tech stock funds might also lead the next bull market. For instance , the Vanguard Information Technology ETF has a 8.58% return in the past 3 months. The tech companies that have survived the past decade are surprisingly strong, and their stocks are relatively cheap.

Investing in technology can be very lucrative, as Bill Gates or Larry Page could tell you. But for every Microsoft or Google, there are a dozen Wang Laboratories and Digital Equipment Corporations, all of which have disappeared. The companies that have survived, however, have emerged both saner and stronger and many firms changed their business models. One of these change is that: many companies now rely as much on revenue from maintaining their existing products as they do from selling new products. Oracle is gaining greater revenue from its maintenance services. New software licenses are down, but it is still getting plenty of income from maintenance fees. Constellation Software in Canada is also getting greater recurring revenues. While some ITC firms are becoming more predictable and less risky in the long-term, many are still cyclical stocks depending on new product launches to keep the growth.

Another big change: many ITC firms have now a lot of cash and hold relatively little debt. And many technology companies have experience with deflation — a period of falling prices. Even though deflation is a relatively rare economic problem, tech prices are almost always falling. The most successful companies have learned how to make money even when cutting prices.

Many tech stocks are still cheap, and those that have survived are far stronger than they were during the 1990s.

For more tech stocks advise, such as portfolio assessment and stock selection, you can contact me.

For more information on changes in technology business models and consulting advises, you can read my chapter of a book: “Advances in Communications and Media Research. Volume 8″, with Dr. Yves Rabeau of UQÀM.

According to the NY Times, the number of privately held Silicon Valley start-ups that are worth more than $1 billion is between 25 to 40.

Among the startups in the $ billion club, there are:

-Evernote

-Airbnb

-Pinterest

-SurveyMonkey

-Spotify

-Box

-Violin Memory

-Zscale

-Dropbox

-MobileIron

-Pure Storage

-Marketo

-DDS

-Palantir

-Twitter

For Phil Libin, chief executive of Evernote, ““There is no safe industry anymore, even here.” Several of those startups are in the enterprise sector.

“A year from now that might be 100,” said Jim Goetz, a partner at Sequoia Capital, a venture capital business. Sequoia counts a dozen such companies in its portfolio. It is part of what he calls “a permanent change” in the way people are building their companies and financiers are pushing up values.

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs argue that the price spiral is not a sign of another tech bubble. The high prices are reasonable, they say, because innovations like smartphones and cloud computing are disrupting some technology sectors that are already worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Marissa Mayer, the new CEO of Yahoo, gave an interesting interview to Bloomberg at the World Economic Forum of Davos in Switzerland this week. She suggests that the future of search technology will be mainly related to personalization of information. In the future you become part of the query in a search engine. What you are searching in the past, what you are posting on blogs and social networks will be taken into account in your search queries. She claims personalization and the importance of context of information in search engines will be more mainstream in three to five years.

Facebook just popularized its Social graph, based on social information. Similarly, Yahoo wants to develop its Interest graph where context and unknown connections between people are shared. For instance, based on an event like the World Economic Forum, the Interest graph can inform people about the presence of interesting individuals who could be sharing some particular interests with them. Whether it is for business developments, networking or leisure activities the interest graph can offer several possibilities.

For Mrs. Mayer, web technologies have been evolving very quickly since 15 years. We are now in the mobile wave, with many innovations in mobiles technologies. Yahoo is using partnerships to gain access to web innovations such as mobile browser or social networks, which represent key enabling technologies.

In the future, Yahoo wants to refresh its products and services based on the web daily habits of its users: reading news, mail, video, search, watching sports, and playing games. The company also intends to develop one of its strengths: user generated content such as Flickr, Yahoo Answers and Yahoo Groups.

OOHLALA is the mobile app for university and college students. OOHLALA help students better connect with their campus and also help campus services better engage with students. Students use the app to enhance their campus life with features such as campus maps, courses, study groups, social scheduling (find where your friends are), campus wall (share conversations and photos), and games.

Problem: Right now if you as a student want to know what’s happening on campus your choices are several Facebook groups, different campus websites etc. Information is fragmented everywhere, and we are betting that mobile the best platform to both organize this information and keep students connected on the go. User discovery is another aspect that’s broken. For example if you are sitting in class and want to connect with other students in real-time (or that cute girl in the front row), current social networks such as Facebook can’t help you as you don’t know their names (but we can).

We did an interview with the CEO of OOHLALA Mobile: Danial Jameel. OOHLALA was part of the Montreal technology accelerator FounderFuel in 2011.

Q1-OOHLALA mobile app is available in how many campus/ student organizations?

Since this semester, we are currently working with 50 campuses in Canada and United States, with another 150 to be launched during the next semester from US, Canada, UK, Singapore, France and potentially Mexico (currently in progress).

Q2-Does OOHLALA monetize with advertising? Any other source of revenue?

We put user experience and satisfaction as our top priority and generate revenues through sources that provide value to students. We currently monetize through premium features for campus services, and location based deals. We don’t do generic ads as its ruins the experience for our community.

Q3-How much money your firm has raised so far for its financing?

I can’t disclose this as yet as we are undergoing some financing, but we have raised our seed round.

Q4-OOHLALA has how many employees?

10-12 (we have some part time community managers)

Q5-What are your goals in one year?

To be the leading mobile platform for college and university students in North America and UK.

Q6-Are you planning any new or complementary product(s) and service(s) in the short-term?

Right now our focus is looking into user feedback and user metrics to optimize UX and streamline performance.Q7- As an entrepreneur, what is your most important challenge, since you graduated from FounderFuel?

Once Demo Day ends and the hype is over, its time to get back to reality and the grind. Demo Day puts you out there in the spotlight which is great, but it also means expectations for you are much higher. The reality of most startups is that after the initial hype they need to figure out the right product to market fit and build a business model before running out of cash. This doesn’t always happen overnight and hard/smart work is required. I knew some founders who were not able to adjust the ‘you are on your own’ reality that sets in after.

On our end, we started our company at the basement library at our university where we iterated 24/7, and ate $4 pizzas to help solve student problems lol (good times). Post Demo day for us meant we could focus back on our users without distractions and on building the best product.